A Multicarrier CDMA System for Joint Time-Frequency Diversity Using Divided Spreading Sequence

One of the principal disadvantages of multicarrier modulation technique is the sensitivity to the frequency offset introduced by Doppler shift. This frequency offset introduces inter-carrier interference (ICI) among the multiplicity of carriers in the multicarrier modulated signal. However, Doppler spread induced by temporal channel variations can provides another means for diversity. In this paper, we propose a modified multicarrier code division multiple access (CDMA) system to exploit Doppler diversity as well as multipath diversity. The key work of our framework is a canonical time-frequency-based decomposition of the mobile wireless channel into series of independent fading channel. The decomposition naturally leads to a time-frequency generalization of the Rake receiver that exploits both multipath and Doppler diversity.